Dive In If You Dare
by MishGothika
Summary: Sequel to Demon Lover. Seduced by a powerful demon, Tori is still haunts her dream, tempting her with the knowledge of how to bring her back. But loving a succubus usually ends in death. Tori must learn to control her desires. AU/OOC Beta - Seyron
1. Chapter 1

The dream began again as all the others had, with moonlight pouring through an open window, shadow branches stretching across the floor, the scent of honeysuckle on the air.

"You're back," I whispered. "I thought . . ."

"That you had sent me away," she whispered. "You did. But it's not too late to call me back. I miss you."

"I miss you too," I sighed.

The moonlight cleaved the dark, carving a cheekbone out of shadow, which I longed to reach out and stroke, so achingly familiar was the face taking shape just inches from my own. But I couldn't move. She was still only shadow hovering above me but I could feel the weight of her, pressing down on me.

"I can't," I panted. "It won't work. We can't be together . . ."

"Why not?" she cooed, her breath lapping against my face. "Because_ they told you I was no good for you_? That _I would hurt you_? How could I ever harm you?_ I love you._"

I breathed in her words and let out a long sigh. My breath filled her chest, each muscle rippling in the silver light like water running over smooth stones in a stream. I felt those muscles slam down against my chest, forcing the air from my lungs. She sipped the air from my lips and the moonlight drew hands from the dark that stroked my face, my throat, my breast . . .

I gasped and her hips bore down on mine. I was filling her out with my breath. All I had to do was keep breathing and she would become flesh and blood.

But I couldn't breathe.

She was sucking the breath out of me, draining my life. Her legs parted mine and I felt her knee press into my center briefly.

What was she waiting for?

She moved away, her body shifted lower. "_You have only to call my name to bring me back_," she whispered, her breath hot in my ear. "_You have only to want me to make me flesh again,_" her lips sealed each word to my throat, my breasts, my navel . . . "_You have only to love me to make me human."_

Oh,_ that_. If I loved her she would become human. It seemed a small thing. I was close, wasn't I? As close as her lips were to my skin as they brushed along my inner thigh. Tantalizingly close. I had only to call out her name and tell her I loved her for the waiting to be over, for the teasing to end . . .

She was teasing me. The little nips on my thighs, the way she moved against me and then retreated. She was holding back, waiting for me to release her from her exile.

"You're trying to bribe me," I said, my voice betraying my desire. Her lips froze on the crook below my right kneecap and they grew chill. Her face appeared above mine, more shadow than moonlight, already fading.

"I wouldn't call it a bribe," she said, her voice sulky. "Just a little taste of what could be."

"But it cannot be," I said trying not to let her hear the regret and frustration in my voice or how much I wanted to love her. "I don't love you . . .yet . . . and I can't love you when you try to make me love you, so you'll suck the life out of me before I can love you."

She frowned. She furrowed her eyebrows and looked confused. She looked sweet when she was confused, but then her confusion turned to anger.

"Nonsense," she hissed, "those are just words." Her body curled into a coil of black smoke. "If you could feel what it's like . . ."

The coil of smoke whipped against the windowpanes, smashing wood and glass. Moonlight flooded in, only it wasn't moonlight anymore, it was a silver water rushing into the room, a wave crashing over my bed, the water shockingly cold after the warm breeze and her hot kisses. I still couldn't move. I was powerless to save myself as the water rose around me. It began pouring from the ceiling, down the walls, into my mouth. As the waters rose, her face floated above me, watching without pity as I drowned. This is what I had done to her, her expression seemed to say; I had exiled my succubus lover to the Borderlands and condemned her to an eternity under water.

I awoke, gasping in the moonlit bedroom, my body chilled despite the hot summer night. I'd never really feel warm again while she was trapped beneath all that cold water. I'd never love anyone if I couldn't love her.

* * *

**AN: Questions bro's , do you like the supernatural in this story or should I just skip to the happy ending?**


	2. Chapter 2

**AN**:Special thanks to my beta Seyron.

* * *

One of the perks of academia – the part that was supposed to make up for the low salary, living in a hick town a hundred miles from a good shoe store and a decent hair salon, putting up with demanding, entitled 18-22-year-olds – was getting summers off. I had always imagined that once I was established in a tenure track job I would spend my summers abroad. Sure, I'd pin the trip on some worthy research goal – reading the juvenilia of Charlotte Bronte at the British Library, or researching the court fairy tales of Marie d'Aulnoy at the Bibliotheque Nationale – but there was no law saying that when those venerable institutions closed at dusk I couldn't spend my evenings caching a show in the West End.

What I had _not_ pictured myself doing during my summer break was swatting through the humid, mosquito-infested woods in knee-high rubber boots.

I had known I was in trouble when I opened my door this morning to find Elizabeth Book, Dean of Fairwick College and my boss, Diana Hart, owner of the Hart Brake Inn, and Soheila Lilly, Middle Eastern Studies Professor, on my front porch.

The first time these three women had shown up on my doorstep together had been last year when they had come to banish an incorporeal succubus from my house.

Only then they hadn't been tricked out in knee-high rubber boots and fishing tackle. I knew that Fairwick was big on fishing but still, fishing seemed like a rather mundane activity for these three women. The dean, as I'd learned this past year, was a witch, Diana an ancient deer-fairy, and Soheila was a succubus.

A reformed, non-practicing succubus. But still. A succubus, an ancient supernatural entity that lived off the desire of human beings.

"What's up?" I asked guardedly. "Is this an intervention for my plumbing? It _has_ been making some strange sounds."

I was only half joking. One of the reasons I had opted to stay home this summer was to get some work done on Honeysuckle House, the lovely – but time consuming – old Victorian house I'd bought last fall. Since I'd been forced to banish my girlfriend, I'd thrown myself into an orgy of home repair.

Today I had been waiting for the arrival of Robbie, my handyman (who also happened to be an ancient Norse divinity), to fix some broken roof tiles, when the doorbell rang.

"No, dear," Diana said, her freckled face breaking into an awkward smile. When the three of them came to banish the succubus from my house I'd joked that they were there for an intervention, but later Diana and Soheila had come to break it to me that my lover, Jade West, was that same succubus and that she was draining not just me but dozens of students of their energy and life, the joke hadn't seemed so funny. I think they all felt a little guilty when we found out Jade was innocent of attacking the students. But she had been a succubus and you couldn't go on living with a succubus _no matter how great the sex was_.

"I'm afraid we have a problem that only you can help us with," Liz said.

"You need me to open the door?" I had learned that I was descended, on my father's side, from a long line of "doorkeepers" – a type of fairy who could open the door between the two worlds. By a lucky – or perhaps unlucky, depending on how you looked at it – coincidence, the last door to Faerie was here in Fairwick; so far my unusual talent had cost me nothing but grief and trouble.

"Yes!" they all three said together.

"What do you want me to let in?" I asked suspiciously.

"Nothing!" Diana insisted. "We want you to let something out. A lot of somethings, actually . . ."

Liz sighed, squeezed Diana's hand, and finished for her. "Undines," she said. "About two dozen of them. Unless you can help us get them back to Faerie they're all going to die."

"It's their spawning season," Soheila explained as we tramped through the woods that started on the edge of my backyard. "It only happens once every one hundred years. The undine eggs . . ."

"Eggs? Undines come from eggs?" I asked, appalled. The only undine I knew about was the water nymph in the German fairy tale who marries a human husband and then, when he was unfaithful to her, curses him to cease breathing the moment he falls asleep.

"Of course, dear," Diana answered, looking back over her shoulder. The path obligated us to walk in twos and Diana and Liz were up in front. "They have tails at this stage so you couldn't very well expect them to give birth . . ."

"Okay, okay," I interrupted. Although I'd written a book called The Sex Lives of Demon Lovers I wasn't sure how much I wanted to know about the sex lives of fish-tailed undines. Thankfully, Diana took the hint and left out more graphic detail of the undines' sex life, concentrating instead on the life-circle of their young.

"The eggs are laid in a pool at the headwaters of the undine . . ."

"Is that why the stream is called the Undine?" I asked. I'd heard of the stream. The lower branch, south of the village, was popular with fishermen, but the Department of Ecological Conservation had declared the upper branch, which had its headwaters somewhere in these woods, off limits.

Liz sighed. "The locals started calling it that because of the legend about a young woman who lured fishermen into the depths of the trout pools and then drowned them."

"They probably just fell in after a few too many drinks," Soheila said. "It's true that undines seduce human men – if they get one to marry them, they get a soul – but they don't kill them unless they're betrayed." Soheila pushed back a vine and let it snap behind her, nearly hitting me in the face.

Soheila was normally the most charming and sophisticated of women, and I had the feeling that the subject was a sensitive one for her. I'd learned this past year that before Angus, Soheila fell in love with a mortal man and he had died because of her succubus nature.

I suspected that she had a crush on Andre Harris; a suspicion confirmed by how melancholy she'd been since he had gone away a few weeks ago to a conference on the "The Discourses of Witchcraft" in Salem, Massachusetts.

"Anyway," Diana continued in the strained cheerful voice of a grade school teacher trying to keep her class on subject, "the eggs hatched into fingerlings that stay in the headwaters until they're mature – we think it takes close to a hundred years – then when they're matured into smolts they begin the downstream journey to the sea."

"The sea?" I asked. "But we're hundreds of miles form the sea."

"The Faerie Sea. The upper branch of the Undine flows through an underground passage into Faerie before it joins the lower branch."

"I thought the door in honeysuckle thicket was the only way into Faerie. You told me it was the last door."

"It is the last door," Liz said, "but there's also an underwater passage to Faerie in these woods . . . or at least there used to be. It's been growing narrower over the years, just as all the other passages to Faerie did until they closed. This passage was only big enough for a juvenile undine to slip through the last time they migrated a hundred years ago. We're afraid that it's clogged now and when a passage to Faerie clogs it's like when an artery to the heart closes – smaller veins open up around it. Unfortunately many of these smaller veins lead to the Borderlands instead of Faerie . . ."

Her voice trailed off and I shivered recalling my dream from last night. To be caught in the Borderlands meant death – or an eternity of suffering.

"So," Liz continued, "We thought with your doorkeeper powers you might be able to open the passage wide enough for them to get straight through to Faerie without getting lost in the Borderlands."

"But I have no idea how to open an underwater passage," I said. This was true, but I was also thinking of the dream. It had started out seductively enough, but had ended with my demon lover trying to drown me. She had been angry with me for trapping her in a watery sort of hell. If that were true, I didn't much like the idea of taking a dip into any body of water that might be connected to the Borderlands.

"Would I have to get in the water?" I asked.

"We don't think so, dear . . . wait . . . do you hear that?"

At first I heard the buzzing of mosquitoes and flies in the heavy humid air. I was about to tell Liz that I didn't hear anything when I became aware of a soft burbling beneath the drone of insects. A breeze stirred the heavy underbrush, bringing with it the delicious chill of running water.

"We're at the headwaters," Soheila said, sniffing the air and lifting her heavy dark hair off the nape of her neck. "The water bubbles up from a deep natural spring – the coldest, clearest water you've ever seen. Not many get to see it because it is carefully hidden."

Although I was still disturbed by the idea of going anywhere near a watery passage to Faerie, the sound of the stream was making my parched mouth water and my sweaty body ache for a cold dip. If I could help the undines without getting into the water I wanted to do it. After all, they were harmless juvenile undines.

Only when I'd agreed to follow the women further into the woods did I remember just how volatile teenagers could be.


	3. Chapter 3

We scrambled through thick tangles of shrub, following the sound of water deeper into the thicket. Pushing the vines aside, we dislodged the bones of small animals and birds. I'd seen remnants like these around the door to Faerie, the remains of creatures that had gotten stuck in the Borderlands and died there.

"Are you sure we can make it through this?" I asked, struggling to keep my mounting sense of claustrophobia at bay. It felt like we were in a wicker basket that was contracting around us.

"Don't worry," Soheila said matter-of-factly. "Liz knows a spell to keep the thicket from closing in on us."

That's when I noticed Liz and Diana were silently mouthing words as they walked through the woods and that the vines were curling away from us as we approached. I felt reassured until I looked back and saw that they were also intertwining behind us. Just when I thought I couldn't stand the claustrophobic woods another second we emerged into the open air: a glad encircled by ferns. I felt and smelled the coolness of water before I saw the pool, which was the same green as the surrounding woods.

The women formed a circle around the basin and then crouched down beside it to scoop handfuls of water to their mouths. In this age of bottled water and rampant pollution it went against most of my instincts to drink from a hole in the ground, but thirst overcame my reservations. I knelt down beside Soheila, cupped my hands beneath the ice cold trickle and brought a handful to my lips . . .

A mineral chill filled me mouth, my throat, my belly . . . then spread outward, plumping every desiccated cell in my body. It was like drinking pure oxygen. I took another sip and it was like sipping the ether of outer space. After my third long draught I bathed my face, resisting the urge to plunge into the shallow basin. Instead I sat back on my heels to take a look around.

The water spilled from rock to rock: a granite stairway leading down to a green pool scooped out of stone. Wild irises grew on the edge of the pools; water lilies floated on top of them. I made my way down to the pool where Soheila, Liz and Diana were bent over, gazing into the water. I crouched beside them and stared into the pool, through crystal clear water down to the moss-covered stones at its bottom. I leaned further . . . and found myself looking into a pair of moss-green eyes, the same colour as the stones at the bottom of the pool. I flinched and the eyes blinked – then vanished in a whirlpool that splashed cold water in my face.

"They're quite frisky," Liz said handing me a bandana to wipe my face.

"They're ready to migrate," Soheila said, pointing to the far side of the pool. At first all I could see were rapids spilling into a fast flowing stream, but as we moved closer I saw that those transparent skeins were actually long thin bodies, slender as eels, slipping over the rim of the pool and into the stream.

"Those are undines?" I asked, recalling the illustration of the winsome maiden Arthur Rackham did for the German fairy tale. She had looked far different from these eel-like creatures.

"Immature undines," Soheila replied slipping her fingers in the water and tickling the underbelly of one of the undines. It flipped over and stared at us with its large mossy eyes. Up close I saw that it did have arms, but they were loosely clamped to its sides by sheer, web-like netting. On some undines the netting had frayed to long streamers. Freeing their arms. "There legs wont form until they get to Faerie. That's why it's so important that they get to Faerie. If they're stranded here . . ." Soheila shook her head sadly. "They can't survive past summer here in this form. Poor things. During the last migration we found several dead ones stranded in the woods."

While I knew that Soheila was ancient, it still unnerved me when she spoke about events that had taken place a hundred years ago as though they had just happened yesterday.

"Let's hurry," Liz said, striking out down the narrow path beside the stream. "The first wave will be reaching the junction pool by now."

I followed the women who now walked single file, trying to keep up with their accelerated pace, but I found myself distracted by the activity in the stream. Beneath the rushing water was the sound of laughter – the raucous, wild twitter and screech of excited teenage girls.

"Are all the undines female?" I asked, watching a slender shape break from a wave and pirouette in the air before gracefully diving back into the stream.

Soheila paused and looked back at me. She seemed unsure if she should answer, glancing nervously ahead on the path toward Diana, but then she answered in a low voice.

"There used to be male undines, but during the last spawning there were only a few. We fear there might not be any this season. We've noticed that many of the indigenous species of Faerie seem to only produce female offspring – and a few only produce males and others simply can't reproduce anymore. It's a source of great concern in the fey community because it means that many species will die out unless . . ."

"Unless what, Soheila?"

"Unless they are allowed into this world to find a mate. Every hundred years, when the juvenile undines run downstream into Faerie there are mature undines on the other side waiting to come through the door to find a human mate. It's their only chance to reproduce."

"So these undines . . ." I pointed to the roiling mass of bodies in the stream, "are the offspring of an undine and a human?"

Soheila tilted her head and gave me a curious look. Instantly I was ashamed of the surprise – and the little bit of horror – in my voice. Soheila, after all, was an otherworldly being who had fallen in love with a human. Perhaps she had hoped for children from the union. I myself had made love to a succubus many – many – times. I felt myself grow hot at that thought. A splash of cold water brought me back into the moment – and my body temperature back down to normal.

Soheila finally answered: "We believe they're the children of an undine who came through the door in the summer of 1914 and a fisherman by the name of Sulivan Trask. Sul, as he was known. In fact the pool we're going to is known as Sul's Eddy." Soheila had resumed the cool, dispassionate voice of a lecturer. "The spot is famous in local angling lore. Come I'll show you the sign."

She turned to go, but I stopped her by laying my hand on her arm. How cold her skin felt startled me. While I knew that Soheila was always cold since she had forsworn feeding off the life force of humans.

"Soheila, was there something else you were going to tell me?"

Soheila sighed – a sound like wind rippling through the pines, reminding me that in the centuries before she became flesh she had been a wind spirit. "Hmm. Well we were going to tell you later after we saved the undines, there's a meeting on Monday, the day of the solstice, of IMP and the Grove."

IMP was the Institute of Magical Professionals and a much more liberal organization than the Grove.

"I'm surprised that the Grove would meet with an organization that includes fairies and demons." I was also surprised – and not a little put out – that my grandmother hadn't told me about the meeting.

"So were we. They said they want to improve relations with the witches of Fairwick. The governing board of IMP thought it was prudent to take them up on the offer of a meeting. The Grove has been growing more and more powerful." I could tell by Soheila's expression that she was not happy about the prospect.

"What do you think about the meeting?" I asked.

"I'm afraid that IMP will be helpless to stop the Grove from pushing their own agenda, which is to close to the door between this world and Faerie."

I knew that the witches of the Grove didn't like fairies. It was an age feud that went back to the time of the witch trials. The Grove witches believed that it was contact with the fairies that had caused the persecution of witches. But I hadn't realized that they took enmity so far as to want to bar the fey from this world.

"Can they even do that?" I asked.

"We're not sure. We know that over the last hundred years every door but the one here has closed. Some believed that it's a natural process, that as this world grows more crowded and polluted the avenues between the worlds become . . . clogged. But we believe that the witches of the Grove have been working spells to close all the doors, and that they intend to close this one. If they do, all of us who came from Faerie will have to decide which world we want to live in . . ." a look of pain flickered across Soheila's soft eyes.

"Why?" I asked. "I mean I thought you already had chosen to live in this world."

Soheila let out an explosion of breath that shook the branches of the trees and rippled the water in the stream. "Many of us have, but we still need to go back to Faerie every few years to refresh our power. Otherwise we begin to fade. If the last door closes, those who live in this world will have to decide between going back or eventually fading and dying in this world."

"What a horrible choice to make," I said.

"Yes," said Soheila, "but at least we have a choice. The ones who would really suffer would be the creatures who need to come to this world to breed – like undines." She waved her hand toward the vibrant stream teeming with young, boisterous creatures. "Without access to this world, their species will die out."

We continued to follow the stream, its gurgle accompanying us like a fifth companion. I had known when I agreed to join the Grove that my loyalty to my friends at Fairwick might be tested, but I hadn't known that I'd be thrust into conflict so soon. If the Grove were really coming would I be compelled to take a side?

My thoughts were interrupted by a loud splash. An undine had leapt over a boulder, her slim transparent body twisting in the sunlight as she performed a backwards flip. Immediately two others copied their sister.

Liz clapped her hands and briskly called In a stern Jean Brodie brogue, "Come along girls, we haven't got all day."

I caught up to Soheila, Liz and Diana at the edge of a waterfall. They were watching the undines tumbling down into a wide pool. Another stream rushed into the pool from the south. In the distance I could make out several fishermen standing knee deep in the water casting their lines out over the sun dazzled water of the lower branch of the Undine.

"Won't the undines be in danger of getting caught in those lines?" I asked. "And wont those fishermen be . . . surprised to find a teenage girl on their hooks instead of a rainbow trout?"

"No and no." Liz told me, "We have to act fast."

At the bottom of the falls there was a metal sign erected by Fairwick Fly Fishing Club.

_Sul's Eddy is one of the most famous pools in angling lore. Formed by the waters of the Undine and the Beaverkill, it is a pool with strange and mystifying currents and eddies. Legend says that the confusing flows cause migrating trout to linger for days trying to decide which stream to enter. This indecisiveness causes delay, which, in itself, is the reason many of the largest trout in the Undine are taken from this pool._

"The same thing happens to the undines," Soheila said.

"Look, you can see them swimming in circles. They're confused by the currents."

I looked into the pool. At first I saw nothing but clear water, then I noticed circular ripples spreading out from the center of the pool.

"This is bad," Liz said. "When a few start swimming in circles they create a whirlpool that sucks all of them into it. It's a sort of mass hysteria."

"How do we get them to stop?" I asked, the spinning circles making me dizzy.

"The way you get all teenage girls' attention," Diana said, pulling a swath of gaily-coloured material out of her rucksack. "By distracting them with something bright and shiny."

The objects in each rucksack were kites – fancy, elaborate kites. Diana had brought different shapes for each of them, but none for me.

"We'll use the kites to lure them to the far side of the pool," Liz explained to me as she took her kite out of its package. "You wait on the far side and concentrate on opening the passage."

I wasn't sure how that would work, but I went obediently to the far side of the pool, sat on a rock overhanging the water, and watched the women launch their kites. Liz sent hers into the air with an impressive cast that landed the kite well into the water. Liz gave the line a gentle tug and the cloth swelled beneath the clear water and took the shape of a mermaid with long red hair and a seashell brassiere, clearly modeled on Disney's Little Mermaid. Within seconds the undines were following the mermaid through the water, their mossy green eyes as wide with wonder as any nine-year-old at Disney World.

Peering down through the water I saw swarms of undines circling the colourful kites. They had formed three separate circles.

"I'm afraid all we've done is make the current even more confusing for them," Liz said. "The underwater passage to Faerie is right below them. Can you see it?"

I leaned further to look into the water. It was difficult to make out anything among the whirling water, but at last I saw something flash among the rocks at the bottom of the pool. It looked like a bright gold coin; so bright it was hard to look at. But as I stared, it grew larger and shot out rays of gold light into the roiling water.

"See!" Diana crowed triumphantly. "Tori just needed to look at the passage to make it grow bigger. I told you she was a powerful doorkeeper."

Clearly there'd been some dispute about the matter, which might have bothered me if I didn't have my own doubts about my power. I squinted up at the three women who stood between the midday sun and me.

"You've opened the door before," Liz said, "I know you can do it again."

"Yeah but it was on the solstice, which is when it's supposed to open," I said recalling the brief glimpse of Faerie I'd had that time: sloping green meadows and distant Blue Mountains. It had looked lush and beautiful and I felt a sudden yearning to go there . . . but then, recalling my dream last night, I felt a chill. As Liz had pointed out, my power was unstable. I might find myself in the Borderlands if I tried the passage to Faerie.

"You opened the door to throw Alyssa through it," Soheila said. "And she certainly didn't want to go."

Alyssa had been a lidrec – a life sucking bird monster – who had masqueraded as my student. She had attacked me and chased me into the woods and nearly succeeded in killing me. "No, she didn't want to go, but she was going to kill me if I didn't get rid of her so I was pretty motivated. Also, I used an opening spell from my spell book . . ."

"Really?" Liz said. "You combined witchcraft with your fey power? That's unusual. Do you recall the spell?"

I did, but I didn't tell them. I also didn't tell them that I'd had help ejecting Alyssa into the Borderlands. I'd opened the door, but I hadn't been strong enough to get her through it. At the last moment before Alyssa would have eaten me whole Jade had appeared in shadow-form, torn her off me, and thrown her through the door. Jade hadn't been able to follow because the iron manacles on her wrists kept her from entering Faerie. She was forever trapped in the Borderlands.

I was the one who'd clamped the manacles on her. I hadn't told the three women about Jade coming to help me. I knew they felt bad about convincing me to banish Jade when it was really Alyssa who had been feeding on students. They didn't need to know that Jade had saved me even after I'd condemned her to eternal pain. Or maybe I just didn't like to admit that the woman I'd banished to eternal pain – the woman I hadn't been able to make human with my love – had saved me.

I blinked and a tear fell into the swirling water. I bent closer to the pool, pretending to study the situation more closely but really trying to hide my tears from the other women.

"Well, then," Liz said briskly, "You should have no problem being motivated now. These undines will die if we don't herd them through that passage."

I nodded my head, still too close to tears to trust my voice, and lowered my face nearly into the surface of the water. The undines had formed into one circle now, moving so fast that it was hard to make out individuals. I wondered if the undines would wear themselves out if they kept up this frantic pace – or beach themselves on the bank and die tangled in the thickets. I laid my hand just above the surface of the water and felt a thrumming vibration, a nervous energy that travelled through my hand, up my arm, and lodged in my chest. Like heartburn.

I focused on chink of light at the bottom of the pool and called out the opening spell.

_Lanuam sprengja!_

The only thing that grew was the burning sensation in my chest. And the tingling in my arm. I was too young to have a heart attack. Wasn't I?

And you couldn't get one from having a broken heart. Could you?

As if I my response to my unspoken question a sadness spread throughout my body – a sadness that was a hundred times my grief over losing Jade, but somehow encompassed that grief. A sadness that had a theme song.

_Who will we love? I went. Will we ever find someone to love?_

Of course. They were teenage girls going to their first dance and they wanted to know if there would be boys there. According to Soheila, there wouldn't be. And if the door to Faerie closed forever these undines would be the last of their species. I was sending them to their extinction. And they knew it. I felt their minds probing mine. Their frantic thoughts traveling up the fingertips of my outstretched hand.

_Don't make us go! Don't make us go!_

Their high-pitched screeching searing my brain, I tried to reason with them. "But you'll die here. Your sisters will be waiting for you on the other side."

I might as well have been shouting at a tornado. In fact the air around me was beginning to spin. The watery maelstrom was spreading into the air. It tugged at my clothes and whipped my hair into my face.

"I think I'm just pissing them off," I shouted into the wind. I started to pull back from the water, but before I could, a translucent hand broke the surface and clamped onto my hand. It was so cold and gooey as jelly, but with a grip like a lobster claw. I opened my mouth to scream but got only a mouthful of water as it pulled me into the pool. The water was ice cold. The shock of it pushed all the air from my lungs and turned me limbs into useless sticks. Unable to resist the undines grip on my arm as she pulled me into the center of the pool, I sank like a stone before we were both sucked into the whirlpool of revolving undines.

I held on tightly as the whirlpool whipped me in circles. I tried to look into the creature's eyes to discover why she had dragged me into their mad dance. Her eyes were full of a manic glee that would have chilled me if I hadn't already been frozen to the bone. Up close, their mossy green was variegated with veins of gold and chips of silver mica. They gleamed like marbles of polished agate. Looking into them was like staring into something elemental: the night sky or the center of an exploding atom. Cold, indifferent, and beautiful, they sucked me into their depths as surely as the whirlpool pulled me down to the bottom of pool.

As I stared into her eyes, my head was full of a high-pitched hum that crowded out every other thought. It was like trying to study with your college roommate having sex right next to you.

_Turn it down!_ I screamed inside my head.

The sound went up, reaching a pitch that sizzled my neurons and then, just when I thought I was about to have an aneurism, it abruptly ceased. The cacophony inside my head evolved into something like music – a cross between Enya and The Pixies. It was the song I'd heard before above the water, the _"Who will we love?"_ song, only it had acquired another verse.

_We'll go if you go, we'll go if you go,_ the undines sang.

_Go where?_ I asked.

_To Faerie, we don't want to go alone_.

_But you've got each other._

At this they returned to their first line: _We'll go if you go, we'll go if you go._

I had a feeling that they could keep up this argument a lot longer than I could – certainly longer than I had breath, which, come to think of it, I should have ran out of already . . . at the frantic thought that I should already have drowned, my undine companion squeezed me close and pressed her cold lips against mine. I was so startled I let her force my lips apart. Her breath tasted like watercress and tuna fish . . . and something improbably fruity and sweet – as if she'd applied raspberry lip-gloss after lunch.

_Razzzzberry_? A voice inside my head inquired. _Lip-gloss_?

_Mmmm . . . razzzberry_, the voice cooed inside my head. The sweetness was on both our tongues, filling my mouth, my throat, my lungs . . . then her lips, no longer cold, left mine and I was staring once again into those cold green eyes . . . only now I thought I saw a spark of humanity or individuality among the mica chips and gold veins.

_We'll go if you go_, she said clearly as if the words had been spoken instead of sung inside my brain. Her eyes shifted and I followed her gaze to the bottom of the pool where the chink of gold light lay like sunken treasure. It was the passage to Faerie. I had only to will it open. I had only to need it to open. Just looking at the light now was making it grow. I felt myself being pulled toward it. The undines, seeing the growing light, had begun to swim toward it, as if attracted by a shiny bauble. I was pulled in their wake; all the while feeling undiluted desire thrumming through the swarm.

_To faerie, faerie, faerie, we'll go if you go._

They urged me on, excited at the prospect of bringing a prize to show their sisters when they arrived.

_Oh what the hell_, I thought_, let's go to Faerie. I'd like another glimpse of it . . .and I could always get back. After all, I was the doorkeeper._

We plunged toward the bottom of the pool where the light was spreading, yielding to the desire in my voice. We shot through a wall of light that fizzled with electricity. I felt like I'd been electrocuted, but the undines liked it_. What the hell! What the hell!_ They chanted. _We're going to Faerie!_

But rather than emerging into Faerie we were plunged into utter darkness. The undines went suddenly quiet, like a group of chattering schoolgirls silenced by the entrance of a stern headmistress. I couldn't see them but I felt their slim shapes slipping ever closer to me. The one who dragged me into the pool still held my hand, but now she seemed to be holding onto it for reassurance.

_Uh oh,_ I thought, _we've strayed into the Borderlands._

* * *

**AN: Hope that was enjoyable ?anyway Lucas you owe me something :P **


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